Option to disable video preview when hovering mouse over thumbnail

[lothar-cell]

⚬ PROBLEM: video thumbnails autoplay on mouse hover.

⚬ SOLUTION: thumbnails were static.

⚬ ALTERNATIVES: -

⚬ RELEVANCE / SCOPE: I'm surprised I did not find this option or a request for it, as I think it's essential.

⚬ "SIDE EFFECTS":

⚬ CONTEXT:
//
Thank you!

SHORT Table	(Summary)
Problem	thumbnails play preview on mouse hovering
Solution	static thumbnails
Alternatives	-
Scope	essential
Side effects	-
Context	-

[D-Rekk]

I tried and here's my take:

• For the homepage: each video has an eventListener of Event("mouseenter"), which will enable the video preview popup. Due to my old experiences, I know that without the original code there could be no way to intercept the Event Listeners (maybe security purposes idk). Only Chrome offers a way to get the eventListeners with getEventListeners(node), but it's only enabled in the ConsoleAPI for debug purposes 🥲.
  After a bit of research though, I found that the Homepage preview player is located in another part of the DOM tree. So what can be done is to remove the element with document.querySelector("#video-preview").remove() with set/clearInterval 🫳🎤.
• For the recommended videos: the same process doesn't happen. The "preview player" is created dynamically on hover and is linked to each video. There would be little to no benefits in removing the player with a lot of JS Observers since the network requests are still being made in the background; the performance will be inferior to normal behavior.

Honestly, I would not bother to implement the feature for the latter, since in recommended videos the preview is really a preview, a gif-like thumbnail that is pretty light.

For the Homepage this feature would be so great, suited for users who hate the player-in-thumbnail preview.

[D-Rekk]

One extra note: when using the YouTube mini-player, hovering on Homepage videos will not make them play in a thumbnail-sized Player, but they'll play as recommended video preview (basically GIF). Just saying 😶‍🌫️